In the field of dentistry, the restoration of a patient's tooth or teeth generally includes the replacement of the natural tooth substance by an artificial substance. For larger restorations, pre-finished dental restorations or prostheses are commonly used to replace the tooth or teeth or at least part of those.
Ceramic materials are widely used for making high-quality dental restorations because of their good physical, aesthetic and biological properties. These restorations are often manufactured in automated processes, which typically include the use of computer-aided design (CAD) techniques and manufacturing by Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machines.
In the manufacturing of dental restorations various automated processes are established in practice. One common method includes the preparation of standardized blanks that subsequently can be used to machine individual dental restorations or precursors thereof by removing material from the blank. Except for providing such blank at a sufficient size suiting for a multiplicity of different types of dental restorations, the shape of the blank typically does not correlate with any individual shape of a tooth in patient's mouth.
While such processes provide various advantages meanwhile so-called build-up processes have been proposed for making dental restorations. Such a build-up process typically allows building up an individual dental restoration in substantially its desired individual shape, generally by subsequently adding material to create that shape instead of providing an oversized standardized blank from which material is removed in a subsequent process. For example WO 2012/078533 describes such a build-up process and corresponding devices for making a dental restoration from a powdery ceramic material.
Restorations manufactured by use of automated processes are often finished, for example by a dental technician, by coloring and/or glazing to make the restoration pleasantly fit with other teeth in the patient's mouth. Co-pending international patent application PCT/US2012/068724 further describes a method and system for providing a dental restoration with an individual color within an automated manufacturing process.
Although existing processes for making dental restoration are advantageous in different respects there is a general desire to provide a process for making individual or customized dental restorations at a high degree of automation, maximized quality and minimized costs.